Bit Quabit

I doubt he meant that third-party developers' hands were tied. I think he means that Microsoft spent incredible resources on backwards compatibility at the expense of innovation. To take the most extreme example I can think of: going from OS 9 to OS X, Apple preserved a (comparatively) handful of APIs as-was, another pile as nearly-the-same-but-requires-modification, and regardless of which they temporarily preserved, made it very clear that you were going to completely rewrite your application if you intended to have a genuinely native OS X experience. By contrast, farking Microsoft OS/2 apps survived into Windows NT 4, and Windows 3.1 apps ran from 1993 through some forms of Windows XP without blinking. Even in the hated Windows 8, Microsoft went out of their way to make sure that they maintained very clear and well-spelled-out migration paths. It is theoretically possible (though you'd be insane) to write a WinRT app in C that mostly uses kernel32.dll, if you want to, because WinRT is unapologetically based on COM, which is in turn based on an old way that vtables happened to be laid out in VC++, which is in turn based on how C structs used to lay out function pointers. This hurts WinRT performance compared to what they could've accomplished with a Swift-like linker.

Did this insane focus on backwards compatibility hurt Microsoft? I don't think you can conclusively say. Did it hurt me as a former Windows developer? Only at best tangentially; all the backwards…

More than a decade ago, some HN commenters claimed "StackOverflow could be thrown together in a weekend", which is very similar to the sentiment expressed here.

StackOverflow employees reply here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ and here: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/

Their main argument is that some developers take an incredibly myopic view of what it takes to run a software business, and I think the same applies here, if not more so, considering Twitter's business model of selling advertising.

From the linked posts:

> If you then tell a developer to replicate StackOverflow, what goes into his head are the above two SQL tables and enough HTML to display them without formatting, and that really is completely doable in a weekend. The smarter ones will realize that they need to implement login and logout, and comments, and that the votes need to be tied to a user, but that's still totally doable in a weekend; it's just a couple more tables in a SQL back-end, and the HTML to show their contents. Use a framework like Django, and you even get basic users and comments for free.

> But that's not what StackOverflow is about. Regardless of what your feelings may be on StackOverflow in general, most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they're interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn't know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes…

Yeah, this tech is definitely pretty amazing. I'm not the biggest fan of facebook so I'll bash them a little bit here -- their biggest success with this was envisioning it (or bolting on) the fact that the react model wasn't built only for the DOM. Originally React & ReactDOM were the same (maybe it was temporary), but when they started to target more platforms, they split them out and that's been a changer as you can see now.

Honestly I think companies that opt for a browser-based non-native UI do those for reasons that won't change just due to RN existing. Once developers get comfortable with RN, and start offering themselves as "we do native apps in half the time, give your users better-than-mobile-browser-site performance", I think the companies that were content to jam a webpage into an app will start improving.

Also note this article with a pretty good criticism of React (I find those are lacking these days): https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/

tldr; Turns out react is a little bit similar to a thing called COM, but maybe we're better at this pattern now and things won't become spaghetti

This blog post is pushing 10 years old and it's about StackOverflow, but it's still extremely relevant: https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/

The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits:

>"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation."

>The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.

I appreciate that you don't have all of the info on whats happening, and that those who do are a tad busy right now.

However, as I understand from your profile you are a coder on Kiln[1]. Are you really telling us you don't know whether there was a backup datacenter or not?

If there was, I understand you might not be able to tell us why it didn't catch the fail-over, or if not, why there wasn't one in the first place. However basic info like whether a backup existed in the first place really seems like it should be within your realm of knowledge.

[1]http://bitquabit.com/page/about/

Yeah, it's all just a few bad apples, there's no underlying problem. Just like all the other women with appalling experiences of sexism in the tech community.

Seriously, if you can't see a fundamental problem, I seriously doubt you're looking very hard.

http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cerian-jenkins/the-tech-industry-is-one-_b_1932440.html
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk
http://bitquabit.com/post/seriously/
http://farukat.es/journal/2012/10/669-kathy-sierra-primer-sexism-discussion